Culture, Technology, & Representation with Youth
In this dissertation, Lili Yan leads our team’s investigation of how students develop relationships with culture through culturally center learning activities.
Culture has been historically considered as peripheral to a Western-oriented educational environment. However, learning environments are, in fact, not culturally neutral, which often prescribes expectations of certain knowledge, practices, and ways of being. In this dissertation work, I work alongside a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, educators, and designers to design a culturally centered learning environment based on our evolving work throughout our multiyear research practice partnership. As a multiple-paper dissertation, I share learner-level insight on how youths develop relationships with culture in the first paper, in which I (re)conceptualize the way youths learn and engage with culture as Ti-Wu. In the second paper, I examine how technology mediates youths’ relationship with culture with a case study approach. I document the design process throughout my dissertation study in a narrative reflection. My dissertation work took place during the COVID-19 pandemic and contributes to the conversation on how to center culture in a formal learning environment when our society is facing multiple challenges to engage learners with culture in the classroom.
Dissertation Committee: Breanne Litts (Chair), Melissa Tehee, Jody Clarke-Midura, Hillary Swanson, Marisela Martinez-Cola
